Working with Containers while working on Windows

With all the rage with containers these days, you may be wondering how to get started and make sure you can be successful if you use a Windows on your preferred client device. One of the cool things about working with containers from a Windows machine is that you can work with both Linux and Windows containers. This post will focus on working with Linux containers, but you’ll need all these tools for working with Windows containers too.

For building containers and working with images locally, you’ll need Docker for Windows. Just go with the default installer options and you should be ready to go in short order. You will need to have machine that supports virtualization and has those features on. When you work with Windows containers, they will run on your OS. When you work with Linux containers, they will run on a Hyper-V VM you can find if you run Hyper-V Manager on your machine.

It’s worth noting if you are going to be working with persistent or shared volumes on your containers, they work a little bit differently on your windows machine. Docker recommends that you use the –mount flag with volumes and when using them for Linux containers, it’s better to share from the Linux MobyVM and avoid using the Windows host directly. However, if you need to use the host directly, you can by sharing the required drive via the Shared Drives feature under the Docker for Windows Settings.

For deploying containers to Azure, you will want the latest version of the Azure CLI 2.0. You DO NOT want anything less than version 2.0.21, trust me. You will use the Azure CLI to do things like create and manage container services (either ACS or AKS), push images to Azure Container Registry, deploy containers to Azure Container Instances and get the credentials to connect to those resources.

Once you are connected to those resources (particularly if they are going to be used for Linux containers), you’ll be using the same tools as anyone working from a Linux client, such as Kubectl for deploying containers to a Kubernetes cluster.

For sanity checking purposes, I also make sure I have Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka “Bash on Windows”) installed and the latest version of Azure CLI 2.0 installed in that environment too. I usually can do everything I need from CMD, but sometimes a strange error has me double checking my work in “Linux-land”. 🙂 Speaking of WSL, if you really want to trick out your WSL setup, read this.

Once you have Linux container hosts deployed in Azure, you may want to connect to one directly using SSH – perhaps your Kubernetes master agent. I use Putty for this, because I like being able to save my connection settings in the application to use again when I’m working on a project over several days. You will need to convert your SSH keys to a PPK file type with PuttyGen before using them to connect to Linux container host. (More to come on key management later, I promise.)

So to sum up… To get started with containers on a Windows machine, you need:

Docker for Windows

Azure CLI 2.0

Putty and PuttyGen

Happy Containerizing… and if you run into some “beyond the basics” challenges, let me know in the comments.